The present invention relates to an engineering work station to be used for computer aided design (CAD), computer aided engineering (CAE), etc. and in particular, to a multiwindow control method and an apparatus using the same for a workstation having a multiwindow function to effect a simultaneous processing of a plurality of processes.
The conventional multiwindow control method, as described in the JP-A-60-205492 and JP-A-57-125989, provides a scheme to discriminate visible windows. For example, according to the JP-A-60-205492, a window to which data can be inputted is called a current window and a window to which data cannot be inputted is called a noncurrent window, wherein the window ready for operation is notified to the operator by use of different brightness or luminance between the current windows and the noncurrent window. In the method of the JP-A-57-125989, when multi-windows are overlapped at least partially overlapped, a portion of the window into which data will be inputted is distinguished from the other portions in such manner that data will be highlighted with white.
However, a case where a window is completely covered by other windows and becomes (to be) invisible to the operator has not been considered at all.
Namely, according to the prior art technology above, it has not been considered how to process such a window concealed by other windows when a plurality of windows are generated. As a consequence, when a plurality of windows are generated and a window to be processed by the operator is completely concealed by other windows, a window delete or a window a push (a function to set the specified window to the last position among the windows) operation must be effected many times to attain the desired window, which leads to a problem that the operability is greatly deteriorated.
Moreover, when a job program associated with the invisible window thus concealed is executed to run, a load is imposed on the CPU of the system, which results in a problem that the performance of the system such as the operability is lowered due to a cause which cannot be recognized by the operator.